Technōs Japan

~ the goodbye ~

Kunio Taki was an executive at Data East when he walked out in December 1981 with two colleagues to start something of their own. Technōs Japan began in a single room apartment in Tokyo. Its first game, Minky Monkey in 1982, is remembered by nobody.

The turn was Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun in 1986, about a high school kid fighting other high school kids, and the kid was named Kunio after the president. That is not a nickname somebody applied later. The company's most valuable character carried the founder's given name for the next decade and across more than twenty games, almost none of which left Japan with the connections between them intact.

Double Dragon reached arcades on 22 April 1987 and the numbers are hard to overstate now. It was the third highest grossing table cabinet in Japan that year, then the highest grossing dedicated arcade machine in America in 1988 and again in 1989. Taito America moved over ten thousand cabinets in the United States in 1988 alone and more than eighty percent of American arcade operators bought one. Forty thousand units went out worldwide. The NES port sold a hundred thousand copies in its first month.

Yoshihisa Kishimoto designed it and what he set down became the rules of a genre: two players walking right against waves of enemies, with weapons you pick up off the floor. Every beat em up for the next ten years is built on that layout, including the ones that beat Technōs commercially.

None of this reached me as a cabinet with a company name on it. i got a machine and a phone line in 1998, two years after the court was finished with Technōs, and by then games of that generation moved as ROM files. A few hundred kilobytes came down a 56k line or came out of a cafe on a disk, you ran it under an emulator, and the publisher screen was a two second thing you pressed a key through. Fifteen years of a company building an identity arrived as a directory of files with the wrong dates on them.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the building ~

Technōs put up its own headquarters in Nakano and finished moving in during 1992. The Technos Nakano Building went up at the exact moment Japanese property stopped being an asset and became a liability, and the arcade money meant to service it was already thinning. Japanese accounts of the collapse add a Formula 3 team to the list of what the company was spending on in the same years.

After that the shape is simple. Kunio-kun was still carrying the company and there was nothing behind it. The last releases in 1995 and 1996 were a Neo Geo fighting game version of Double Dragon and a Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer tie in, neither of which changed the arithmetic. The bankruptcy is dated 20 December 1995 in Japanese sources while the English record just says 1996, which is when the office actually emptied. Both are honest. The filing and the end were a few weeks apart.

~ what replaced it ~

Kunio Taki started again immediately. He set up Million Co. with Mitsuhiro Yoshida, who had produced the Kunio-kun games, and Million bought the intellectual property out of the wreck. It is an unusual ending: the president of a bankrupt company forming a new one to buy back the character named after himself.

Million licensed the catalog out for nearly twenty years, then sold all of it to Arc System Works in June 2015, which has kept River City games coming since. Double Dragon has been remade and licensed into other people's work for close to forty years now. The company that made it lasted fourteen.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »